OnePlus 3T Review

OnePlus launched the 3 in June 2016 and replaced it five months later with the 3T, which swapped the Snapdragon 820 for the 2.35GHz 821, grew the battery from 3000 to 3400 mAh, upgraded the selfie camera to a 16MP Samsung sensor and added a 128GB option. Owners of the 3 were annoyed; everyone else got the best value phone of the year. Six gigabytes of LPDDR4 was excessive in 2016 and OxygenOS 3.5 did almost nothing with it, which is exactly why the phone felt fast for years: near-stock Android, an alert slider, a headphone jack, and nothing running in the background that you had not installed yourself.

Dash Charge was the party trick. Twenty watts at 5V/4A with the heat kept in the brick rather than the phone, so it charged at full speed while you played a game on it, and took the cell from empty to about 60 percent in half an hour. The 16MP Sony IMX298 had OIS and produced clean daylight shots, but it fell apart in low light next to a Pixel or a Galaxy S7, and the 1080p Optic AMOLED was a resolution class behind the QHD flagships. No water resistance, no wireless charging, no microSD. What it had was longevity: it shipped on Marshmallow, moved to Nougat and Oreo, and got Android 9 Pie in 2019, still quick when that arrived.